


There's no Pride in Sharing Scars to Prove It

by tigerlily_sunshine



Category: 5 Seconds of Summer (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Band, Angst, Character Death, Dark, Foster Care, Ghost Ashton, Ghost Calum, Ghost Luke, Ghosts, Happy Ending, Hate Crimes, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Loneliness, M/M, OT4 Friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-05
Updated: 2016-12-20
Packaged: 2018-09-06 12:05:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 15,632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8750146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tigerlily_sunshine/pseuds/tigerlily_sunshine
Summary: “D’you think that, maybe, life isn’t supposed to be good for some people?” asks Michael. “Like d’you think that, maybe, life is just supposed to be awful and then you die? I mean, you know, for some people?”“I am certainly the last person you should pose that question to,” answers Calum, “but maybe.”(In which Michael's only friends in the entire world are ghosts.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from Bastille's "Fake It."
> 
> This is loosely inspired by the first season of American Horror Story; however, I only ended up borrowing the idea of people becoming ghosts if they die on the property and also, to some extent, possibly the idea of being loved when someone dies. There are no spoilers for AHS, and neither is there any reference to it. The setting is not meant to be the house from AHS. It is just some random house in some random (American) city. 
> 
> Pay attention to the tags for this story, as they indicate what could potentially be triggering. There is a character death, but it isn't a "bad" death. [You'll understand, but, basically, it has to do with exactly how one becomes a ghost and what being a ghost actually entails.] There is a happy ending. Still, if any death whatsoever bothers you, this probably isn't the story for you. There is some reference to, as well as outright discussion of, suicide. This story is not meant to glorify suicide. Neither is it meant to glorify death. Also, this is not meant to be an all encompassing, accurate depiction of foster care, which, unlike the situation in this story, is meant to be good. 
> 
> [Message me on tumblr](http://tigerlily-sunshine.tumblr.com/ask) if you have any concerns but might want to read the story anyway, and I will try to be as forthcoming as possible for exactly what a tag refers to.

“D’you think that, maybe, life isn’t supposed to be good for some people?” asks Michael. “Like d’you think that, maybe, life is just supposed to be shit and then you die? I mean, you know, for some people.”

Calum snorts. He appears out of nowhere right in the middle of Michael’s new room. He is still dressed in the same black jeans and red flannel that he wore the first day Michael met him, nearly two months ago when Michael’s family moved into this old house. He has snagged a baseball cap this time, one of Michael’s old ones from California, and he wears it backwards, smashing down his dark curls.

“I am certainly the last person you should pose that question to,” answers Calum. He meanders over to Michael’s bed and sits down, leaning up against the headboard with his legs criss-crossed. “But maybe.”

Michael glares at Calum through the mirror attached to his dresser until Calum gets the message. Calum sighs, put upon, and unfolds his legs so that he can kick his shoes off. They land, one after another, with loud _clomp_ s. He folds his legs back underneath him, returning to his previous position.

“Quite pointless, that was,” mutters Calum.

Michael ignores him and returns to his previous question.

“I mean, look at you and Ashton and—and even Luke. Luke’s family loved him, but it wasn’t enough. He’s still stuck here. You’re all still stuck here.”

“And what a picnic that is,” says Calum, fruitlessly flicking at the black nail polish on his pointer finger, “having to share my old room with somebody who has such an atrocious taste in music.”

“Hey! You like Blink and Green Day and MCR. My music taste isn’t bad. Yours is just outdated.”

Calum snorts again. It must be a habit, because he does it a lot when he appears to Michael. If it weren’t for the fact that Calum is always making fun of Michael when he makes such a sound, Michael might find it endearing. As it stands, Michael kind of wants to punch him every time he makes the noise—not enough to hurt him, of course, but enough to deter Calum from such a derisive sound in the future. Knowing Calum, though, he would just go all incorporeal, and Michael would end up flat on his face.

Better not chance it, then.

“Let’s just agree that the new trash you listen to is utter garbage and nobody should ever be submitted to such a torturous noise,” says Calum.

Michael rolls his eyes but doesn’t otherwise dignify Calum with a response. It would be pointless. If there is one thing Michael has learned about Calum, it is that Calum loves music more than anything in the world—except, maybe, snorting at Michael like he has never before met such a stupid human being. Michael is pretty sure it is mostly for show, though, because the one time he joked that he should just quit school because he was so fucking stupid, Calum had bashed him across the head with his own text book, told Michael that he was the smartest person Calum had ever met, and had refused to speak to Michael for a solid two weeks afterward until Michael finally caved and admitted that he wasn’t as stupid as he said he was—that math was just outrageously hard.

If Michael had known that admitting defeat to the subject of mathematics would instill Luke in his life nearly as much as Calum pops in all of the time, Michael might have reconsidered apologizing to Calum in the first place. Luke is exceptionally serious about school work, namely math, and he doesn’t let Michael skip homework like Michael used to do when he didn’t live in a house haunted by a scholastic ghost. No amount of whispering the right answer in Michael’s ear will help Luke’s case, either, because, as far as Michael is aware, Luke can’t go to school with him and whisper the answers there, so Michael essentially has to learn everything the hard way just to get Luke off his back.

“Look, I’m just saying that moving here was shit, and it was supposed to fix things, but, if anything, it’s made everything worse. My foster mother’s shacking up with the handyman who lives next door, and my foster father is doing whatever the hell he can to pretend like everything is perfect,” says Michael, with a sigh. He runs his hand through his fading red hair and thinks, off topic, that he should dye it again soon. He turns around to face Calum, leaning up against the dressed behind him. “The kicker of it all is that I shouldn’t care. They’re just my foster parents and don’t give a damn about me beyond the check they get for my upkeep every month, but, dammit, the entire reason they drug me halfway across the damn country is to fix their sorry-ass problems. They’re not fixing anything. They’re just running away from them here.”

Calum is quiet as he stares right back at Michael, biting on his bottom lip. Michael knows this look. His heart lurches in his chest. This is Calum’s hurt look, and Michael hates it. He hates it even more right now, because he is the one who put it there.

“Not everything is shit, though,” says Calum in a soft, hesitant voice. “I mean, you’re not alone anymore. You’ve got me—and you’ve got Luke and Ashton, too, you know. We’re here if you need us.”

Michael sighs. He averts his gaze to the carpeted floor at his feet, unable to look Calum in the eyes any longer. It is too much, both because Calum is right—that Michael does have people here and he used to didn’t—and because it doesn’t really help to have the company of dead people in the midst of such _human_ problems. Michael certainly can’t mention the latter reason to Calum. It isn’t nice to speak ill to the dead, especially to those who are nice enough to provide a nice distraction from the utter loneliness that otherwise crushes Michael on a day-to-day basis.

“I know,” says Michael. “But the problems they were supposed to fix here aren’t going away—and I kind of feel like, maybe, it’d be better if I went away instead.”

“Michael.”

“Don’t. Okay?” snaps Michael, snapping his head up to glares at Calum with fire in his eyes. “I know what you’re going to say. This house, it latches onto people and doesn’t let them leave once they’re dead, but you can’t honestly tell me that being dead wouldn’t be better than this hell? That being dead _isn’t_ better than this hell?”

“You don’t know what you’re giving up,” says Calum. His gaze lingers on Michael like he can’t bring himself to look away in the importance of this moment—or maybe like he can’t bring himself to _ever_ look away. “It’s an eternity of solitude.”

“Living under _their_ roof is an eternity of isolation. What’s the difference?”

“You’re supposed to grow old,” says Calum. His eyes are wide and so, so brown, and they’re boring straight into Michael’s as if they’re looking into Michael’s very soul. Who knows. Maybe that is a thing that ghosts can actually do. “That’s what is different. Dead, you’re stuck here forever. Living, you can get out the moment you turn eighteen, and you’ll never have to look back.”

Michael sighs, glancing down at his hands where, around his wrists, solid purple bruises are hidden away from Calum’s sight. He doubts Calum knows about them—or about the others—or else Calum wouldn’t fight so hard to convince Michael to keep on living. The thing about Calum is that he doesn’t linger when he isn’t needed. He only shows up when Michael is alone and in need of company. It is a house-rule among the ghosts that they honor the living family’s privacy. Calum had gotten in enough trouble in the beginning for showing himself to Michael back when Michael first moved in. He probably doesn’t go around looking for more.

“That’s still two years away,” says Michael, and he leaves it at that.

 

Ashton, unlike Calum, likes to hover. He is a stickler for rules, though, and only shows himself when Michael, the sole living occupant of the house who knows about the ghosts, is alone. When Calum takes his leave of Michael before dinner time, Ashton walks Michael down to the dining room where Michael is doomed for a farce of a family meal.

“Calum means well, you know,” says Ashton, dropping into step next to Michael. His footsteps, unlike those of the living, make no sound against the aged wood, not even on the rickety old steps that Michael’s foster father has sworn he is going to restore. “He’s stronger than I ever was when it comes to this, but the truth is that the easy way out isn’t getting yourself stuck here for eternity. It’s getting your ass out of those doors for good and then living a full life of opportunities that we never got to have.”

Michael groans.

“Not you, too.”

Ashton grins over at Michael. He looks youthful. Of course, all ghosts look the age they did when they died, and Ashton died young, like Calum and like Luke and like several of the other young ghosts who roam these halls. Ashton has a head full of blond curls and crooked smile that looks like it belongs in one of those old time movies that Michael’s foster mother likes to watch late at night instead of sharing a bed with her husband.

Unlike Calum, who prefers the same predictable outfit every day, Ashton likes to switch things up, proving that ghosts are not totally frozen in time. Today, Ashton is wearing a gray pair of sweat pants and an old t-shirt with a faded out logo. Michael is totally going to have to ask Ashton where exactly he gets his clothes from, because the t-shirt looks like it might have been in one of the boxes Michael has yet to unpack.

Ashton runs a finger along his left wrist where age-old scars paint his skin with jagged white lines. They are all over his arms, from the spot where the palm of his hand ends to the crease of his elbow. A long, single pink line runs perpendicular to the rest on both of his arms. They are his mortal wounds, the places where his body spilled too much blood.

Michael wants to ask if it hurt, dying. Or if it hurt more to live. He always has the passing notion to ask any of the ghosts that he runs across, but he thinks Ashton’s answer might be different than the rest.

“C’mon, I can’t just let you die here without warning you away, as hypocritical as it may be coming from me. It gets lonely. I like you too much to sentence you to my fate.”

“You have Luke. How lonely could eternity be with Luke by your side?” challenges Michael.

Ashton opens his mouth to respond but shuts it in the next second, thinking better of his answer. He hesitates for the span of three steps, all the way to the main level of the old house. Michael knows that he has proved his own point through Ashton’s silence alone. Ashton would choose eternity wherever Luke is, regardless of the other consequences—like watching one’s own mother find them in a tub full of their own blood or, worse, watching one’s family move away for good and never, ever come back to such a house of horrors.

“You have the whole world at your fingertips. You shouldn’t waste it away just because your parents suck,” says Ashton, changing tactics. “Everybody has shitty families.”

“Luke didn’t,” counters Michael. “He said his parents and his brothers loved him very much.”

“Luke didn’t off himself, either,” says Ashton, with an air of annoyance that is probably the result of Michael shooting down his every argument. “He doesn’t count. What I mean is that having shitty parents is no reason to think you’ve got a shitty life.”

Michael thinks of the bruises around his own wrists and of the ones that litter his back. It isn’t fair to expect Ashton to take them into consideration when Michael himself does everything he can to keep the ghosts ignorant to the skeletons in his family’s closet. It isn’t any of their concerns. Michael has been dealing with it for far longer than he has even known that ghosts exist.

“I’ve got nothing else going for me, either,” says Michael, shrugging his shoulders and putting the thoughts of his bruises out of his mind in the vain hope that, maybe, by not thinking of them, he won’t get any more tonight. “No friends. Shitty ass parents. No career prospects. I couldn’t cut it in college. I mean, Luke can’t follow me there and help me cheat my way to a degree, so that’s hopeless.”

“You have friends—or are Calum, Luke, and me not good enough ‘cause we’re dead?” teases Ashton, but he sobers in the next instance. “You’ve got so much to live for. You’re smart enough to make it in college—maybe not in math, but there are tutors, I’ve heard. You can make something of yourself, but you can’t do that if you get trapped in this house with the rest of us.”

Michael stops right in front of the door to the dining room, knowing that once he goes inside, Ashton will disappear. He isn’t yet ready to end the conversation, not with Ashton having the upper hand. He looks over Ashton in his corporeal form right in front of him and meets his eyes.

“All of my friends are in this house. You know, you guys are the only ones who have ever looked at me twice. Tell me that’s not enough of a reason to stay here.”

But even if Ashton had, in fact, wanted to Michael just that, he isn’t given a chance. Michael pushes open the door to the dining room where his foster parents are already seated at opposite heads of the too-long table. Ashton disappears into nothingness, forced away to wherever it is that ghosts go when they have house-rules to abide.

 

Dinnertime is a rigid affair. An honest-to-god butler waits on the family hand and foot, carrying in each course of the meal in shiny metal platters that makes the whole ordeal seem a great deal fancier than it really is. Michael hates the theatrics. He only manages to refrain from rolling his eyes, because the last time he showed such distaste for his adopted parents’ pleasures, he received a sound whipping right at the dinner table.

So Michael accepts the plate butler places in front of him. He waits until there are steaming hot plates of food in front of his adopted parents, too, before he gently picks up his fork. Still, he doesn’t eat. It is a test, one that Michael will be damned to fail again. He must wait for his adopted father to take a bite and then his foster mother to sip from her glass of red wine and comment that her stomach isn’t made for such heavy foods before Michael himself can commence his dinner.

The whole charade takes an entire fifteen minutes to play out. Michael keeps quiet. He holds his fork poised above his plate and carefully watches each of his foster parents out of the corner of his eyes, too terrified to fuck this all up to even look directly at either of them. Finally— _finally_ —his foster mother turns down the meal. Michael’s own food is long cold by now, but he shovels in the first bite and doesn’t plan to stop until there is nothing left and he can ask to be excused.

 

Luke is waiting outside of the dining room when Michael finally braves the request to be excused. Tonight is a lucky night. Neither his foster father nor his foster mother bother acknowledging him beyond assenting to his request. Michael takes large, measured steps all the way to the safety of the hallway outside. Luke appears out of nowhere.

“Ashton says you’re depressed,” is Luke’s greeting.

Michael bites back a groan. He stares, level-headed, at Luke instead. It is a little disappointing that Michael has to look slightly up just to meet Luke’s eyes but he does so anyway. Even in death, even as a ghost, Luke still has the prettiest blue eyes Michael has ever seen—not that he would ever tell Luke that. It would go to his head, and his ego is already large enough to last him for the eternity he is stuck in this house.

“’M not depressed,” says Michael, because he doesn’t think he is. He isn’t sad all of the time, only sometimes and even then it’s over normal things. He just likes to sleep a lot, and he feels lonely—isolated in the house of the dead—but, surely, that is normal for a teenager, except the whole living with ghosts thing. “What does Ashton know about it anyway.”

Luke snorts. Michael only meant it defensively, but, once he considers his words, he, too, sees the flaw in his argument. Ashton probably knows the most about depression out of anybody in the entire world. It is what done him in, after all.

“Ashton is overreacting,” says Michael as he makes his way toward the stairs. He needs to get as far away from the dining room as possible before his foster parents finish dinner. They didn’t seem to notice him a few minutes ago, but he doesn’t care to push his luck. Their temperaments can change in the blink of an eye. “I’m not depressed. I’m just—”

“Jealous of the dead?” asks Luke, hurrying to catch up to Michael. It easy enough to do with his legs, which go on and on for miles, it seems. The pair of gray sweat pants he has on stop just above his ankles. It must be Ashton’s. The black, holey t-shirt no doubt belongs to Ashton, and Michael has heard, as well as gathered for himself, that Luke has a penchant for wearing other people’s clothes. Mainly, it is Ashton’s clothes he steals, but, occasionally, Calum complains about Luke’s kleptomania, and Michael himself has lost a couple of shirts he swears Luke nicked.

“’M not jealous of the dead,” says Michael, automatically.

The thing is, though, he isn’t sure how true that is. Luke certainly doesn’t have purple bruises around his wrists from the atrocities committed by the living. Ashton doesn’t wake up in cold sweat in the middle of the night at the faintest creak in the house, terrified that his foster father is coming for him. Calum doesn’t have to face every single day all alone among a sea of people who don’t care for the weird, transplant kid.

Maybe being dead would be easier.

They certainly have it better. 

“Did you know Ashton scared the hell out of me when I first moved in?” asks Luke, changing the subject as he follows Michael into Michael’s bedroom. Luke isn’t like Ashton or even like Calum. He knows how to accept Michael’s word without reading too far into it. That is one of the reasons that Michael puts up with Luke occasionally nicking his clothes.

Maybe it is the calm before the storm. Maybe Luke is merely dropping the subject now to bring it up again later when he has Ashton or Calum to back him up. Luke is always better when he has somebody on his side.

But Michael doesn’t care too much. He is glad for the reprieve of the subject for now. He closes the door behind Luke and then crosses the room to lounge across his bed. Luke joins him a moment later, kicking off his shoes without Michael needing to ask him to do so. His socks are mismatched, a bright purple one with green polka dots and a faded orange one with a hole in the toe. They clash so horribly, but they are so endearingly _Luke_ that it somehow works.

“This was my room. My bed was just about here, and I was unpacking a box over there,” says Luke, pointing at a spot next to the closet where Michael has his acoustic guitar propped up on a stand. “I had a desk there, this old rickety one that my older brother gave to me when he got a new one. I was setting books on it so that I could put them away on my shelf, and they kept disappearing as soon as I put them down. I turned around and nearly had a heart attack. Ashton was there, of course. He had put all of my books in alphabetical order on the shelf, and he was grinning at me like he was so happy to help me.”

Michael laughs, seeing the scene play out in his mind. It is a totally typical thing for Ashton to do—help the new kid move into the room that once belonged to him. Maybe Ashton fell in love with Luke that day. Michael can’t imagine a single moment in which Ashton didn’t love Luke.

“I threw a dictionary at him,” adds Luke, with a laugh. “Flew right through him, and I nearly pissed my pants, I swear—but he gave me the whole ghost spiel. You know the one that Calum gave you? Yeah, and I had to believe him on the spot, ‘cause, well, my dictionary was halfway across the room in the floor, and Ashton was standing before me unharmed.”

Luke pauses for a moment.

“I fell in love with him that day,” he admits. “Kind of pathetic, isn’t it? Falling in love with the first ghost you meet?”

Maybe Luke had expected Michael to laugh. He certainly raises his eyebrows at Michael as if waiting for such a reaction. Michael doesn’t laugh. It isn’t too funny. He understands Luke all too well. Michael is pretty sure he himself has been head over heels in love with Calum from day one.

“It worked out for you, though, didn’t it?” asks Michael. He doesn’t want to consider why exactly it is that he is asking this question—if it is merely a natural segue of the conversation of if maybe Michael’s subconscious is telling him something. He would like to think it is the former. Lately, though, it is more likely it isn’t that at all. “I mean, aside from the whole dying thing? You’ve got forever with Ashton.”

Luke smiles. Michael loves Luke’s smiles. They light up an entire room, no more so than they do whenever Ashton is the cause of them. Luke is beautiful when he smiles, even with the faint scars of a busted lip.

“Yeah, I suppose it did work out.”

 

Luke stays in Michael’s room the rest of the evening, as per usual. Michael has some homework he needs to do, and Luke is kind enough to help him out, which actually means that Luke is nice enough to work all of the problems for Michael. Luke likes learning. He likes schoolwork, too. Michael thought Luke was a little odd when Luke first admitted such a secret to him, but once Luke explained that he had wanted to be a school teacher back when growing up was a certainty for him, Michael stopped finding Luke’s quirk weird.

He found it sad instead.

Michael isn’t sure what exactly it is about Luke that makes him seem so full of life even in death, but something does. It is this about Luke that Michael loves the most. Out of all of the ghosts stuck in this house, Luke is the one who doesn’t belong the most. Maybe it is because Luke had such a loving family when he was alive. Or maybe it is because Luke, unlike Ashton or Calum, _chose_ to be trapped here for eternity—that Luke had a choice to die somewhere else and move onto a much different afterlife, but he begged his brothers to bring him here.

 

“You never told me how you died,” says Michael, conversationally the next afternoon.

He is sitting at his old, rickety desk with a chemistry book propped open in front of him. He is supposed to be working on stoichiometry problems for class tomorrow, but he has taken to doodling aliens in the upper right hand corner of his sheet of notebook paper. He likes chemistry, as much as he likes any school subject, but he doesn’t care for doing pointless busy work when the teacher is barely going to glance at the answers, let alone his method. Since Luke isn’t in here to force him to do the work, Michael has even less motivation to do the problems.  

“No, I didn’t,” answers Calum, from behind Michael. He places his hands on Michael’s shoulders. His skin is cool against Michael’s warm, living body. He cranes his neck to look at Michael’s paper. “You forgot a decimal point on problem three. Your answer is totally off.”

Michael jumps at Calum’s proximity. Last Michael knew, Calum was seated on the head of Michael’s bed, his bare feet propped up on the fold of Michael’s covers. Michael hardly ever makes his bed. It seems like a colossal waste of his time, since it serves no purpose whatsoever. Calum doesn’t seem to mind anyway. His is the only opinion Michael finds that he cares for—well, maybe Luke’s and Ashton’s, too, but they don’t care, either, if Michael’s bed is messy.

“’S not like it matters,” mutters Michael. He erases the decimal point anyhow and puts it in the right place. “Should have just conned Luke into doing this for me. You think he would if I told him where I hid the chocolate in here?”

“I probably wouldn’t mention you’re hiding chocolate in here or he’ll turn this place upside down himself to find it,” says Calum. He doesn’t chide Michael for relying on Luke’s help to do his schoolwork. “You’re doing well enough on your own.”

Michael shrugs out from underneath Calum’s hands and spins around in his chair to face Calum instead. He brackets his knees on either side of Calum’s legs. He ignores how intimate this feels, because, surely, he is the only one who thinks as much. He looks up at Calum and sighs.

“Stop avoiding the question,” he says.

“Didn’t realize you posed a question,” answers Calum.

As if to support his confusion, he furrows his eyebrows. If Michael didn’t know Calum better—if he hadn’t learned every one of Calum’s quirks over the past few months of living in this house and become fast friends with the ghosts who inhabit it—Michael might be fooled into thinking that Calum really doesn’t know what he is talking about. Michael isn’t.

“Ashton offed himself. Took a razor blade to his arms and bled the fuck out in the bathroom down the hall. Luke ran into some kids at school who thought he was trash because he was gay. They beat him to death, nearly, and he begged his brothers to bring him here so that he could be somewhere that he was loved and happy forever,” says Michael, summarizing the cold, hard facts of his friends that he has garnered from them over the past few months.

Ashton’s story had been the easiest to get. Perhaps it was because Michael understood Ashton in a way that neither Luke nor Calum did. Luke’s story, however, had come in bits and pieces. Most of them from Luke himself but some of them from Calum and Ashton, too. It hadn’t been easy to listen to. It had been even worse reading about it in the public library’s archived newspaper collection.

Calum, however, had never been forthcoming with his cause of death. Neither Ashton nor Luke offered any information, either. Perhaps they didn’t know, but Michael doubted that. There were no secrets between the dead—at least not as far as Calum, Ashton, and Luke were concerned. It was more likely that Calum had made them swear to never, ever speak of whatever atrocity had happened to immortalize him as a ghost at the age of sixteen. Maybe he even house-ruled them.

“You’ve never said how you died,” says Michael, looking Calum square in the eyes. “Not once in the six months I’ve been here.”

Calum offers Michael a half-smile that isn’t an answer at all. He shrugs like it doesn’t matter. Maybe it doesn’t matter to the dead. There is no changing the past, after all. It does matter to Michael, though, because, truthfully, Michael has never cared so much about anybody else in his entire life, and it doesn’t feel right not knowing a large chunk of Calum’s past that made Calum who he is today.

“My mother says not to scare off the living, that there is something special about mortality that we should respect,” is what Calum says in lieu of an actual answer to Michael’s question. His half-smile transforms into a full-blown one, and it is beautiful on his face. Michael’s heart skips a beat in his chest. “I think she’s right. Some awful secrets are better kept to keep the living happy—especially where the pretty ones are involved.”

Michael’s breath catches in his throat. His next question flees from his mind.

“I am going to kiss you now,” declares Calum, leaning toward Michael. “Have wanted to for a while. Wasn’t sure you’d want to kiss me back, but—but Luke said he thought you might.”

Calum hesitates, his lips centimeters from Michael’s own, like he is giving Michael an opportunity to tell him that Luke was wrong, that Michael doesn’t want to kiss him at all. Michael knows this is a ploy for Calum to avoid the subject of his death a little while longer, but the rational part of his brain turned to mush the moment Calum called him _pretty_. It isn’t that important right now, Michael supposes, how Calum died, because Calum is dead and a ghost before him, and he wants to kiss Michael, and Michael wants to kiss him back.

All that Michael can see is Calum before him—is Calum’s plump pinks lips. All that he can think about is how much Luke was right, that he wants to kiss Calum. Michael has never kissed anybody. Grade school kisses underneath desks at recess don’t count as kisses, at least not in the sense that Michael wants to kiss Calum.

Michael is the one to bridge the distance between them, pressing his lips against Calum’s, but Calum kisses Michael like he meant what he said—like he has wanted to kiss Michael for a long, long time. Calum’s lips are cool against Michael’s own. That is only to be expected. Ghosts are not alive. Their bodies aren’t warmed by a beating heart or blood running through their veins. But Michael feels even more alive than he ever has with his lips pressed against Calum’s.

Somewhere in the back of Michael’s mind—in the tiny part of Michael’s brain that isn’t consumed by Calum’s lips against his own—Michael realizes that, though Calum dodged the question of his death, he revealed something that Michael had not yet considered: Calum’s mother is dead, too.


	2. Chapter 2

“How did you know that I wanted to kiss Calum?” asks Michael the next afternoon as a greeting to Luke, who is already stretched out across Michael’s bed like it is his own.

To be fair, this room used to be Luke’s, and maybe this is what Luke did every day after school back when he was alive. Michael doesn’t know. He might ask one day. Sometimes, Luke becomes sad talking about his time among the living, because Luke himself misses his family, who he can never, ever see again, so, on second thought, Michael isn’t sure that his curiosity is bigger than his fear of upsetting Luke.

“So I was right,” says Luke, grinning. He sits up in Michael’s bed and presses mute on the remote to silence the ’90s sitcom he loves so much. Michael has the entire boxed set—it was a parting gift from one of his previous foster families who couldn’t afford to keep him any more—and Luke has probably watched the entire series half of a dozen times since Michael moved into this house. “Ashton totally owes me an entire hour’s worth of—”

“I don’t want to know about whatever sexual favor you have won from Ashton,” says Michael, cutting Luke off, because Luke has that nefarious glint in his eyes that he only ever gets when something he says is going to embarrass the hell out of somebody. Very little ever bothers Ashton, but he is incredibly tight-lipped about his intimate relationship with Luke, because of how _precious_ Luke is to him, and Michael really doesn’t want to spend the next two weeks avoiding eye contact with Ashton just because Luke let it slip what Ashton does to him in their private moments.

Also, as much as Michael loves Ashton and Luke and their relationship together, Michael would much rather not have to deal with whatever mental image Luke might instill into his mind, because Michael is near-certain that it will be nothing short of scarring.

“You know as well as I that he would have done whatever it is anyway, just because he loves you so damn much,” adds Michael.

Luke grins even wider, like the idea of Ashton’s love for him will never, ever fail to please him. Michael supposes for two ghosts stuck together for eternity, it’s a damn good thing Luke loves Ashton as much as he does and that Ashton loves Luke equally as much in return. It would probably be an equivocal hell to be stuck with a sordid ex for the rest of time without a chance of escape.

“Calum loves you, too, you know,” says Luke. “He doesn’t just want to kiss you because you are pretty—though I suppose that’s a good reason to want to kiss someone, too.”

Michael’s heart skips a beat, because, yes, Calum had called him beautiful last night and had kissed him and then had spent the rest of the night kissing him until Michael had fallen asleep with numb lips and butterflies in his stomach, but Michael hadn’t expected such candidness from Luke. Then again, Luke doesn’t fear love. Perhaps it is because he is dead. Or, more likely, it is because he is forever destined to spend eternity with his soulmate with no fear of separation. Luke is a little fearless when it comes to love.

“He’s not going to tell you, because there are rules, and, really, what can a ghost’s love do for the living?” adds Luke. He chuckles humorlessly. “If you ask me, the rules are stupid. No, you aren’t stuck here forever, but you can’t help who you fall in love with, can you? So isn’t it better to spend a little time with someone you love than to deny it and spend the rest of your years wondering ‘what if?’”

As valid as Luke’s argument may be, Michael can’t get past the first thing he said. Michael drops his book bag on the floor next to his door. It is filled to the brim with homework that he will ask Luke to help him with later. For now, he crosses the room to sit on the foot of his bed, facing Luke.

“I never said I loved Calum.”

“Didn’t have to,” says Luke, shrugging. “Even Ashton knows you love him, and Ashton is usually the first one telling me to keep my nose out of the living’s business—that’s very hypocritical of him, by the way. He’s the one who shadowed me the entire time I was living here, because, the way he saw it, he only had a limited amount of time with me and he wanted to make the most of all of it.”

“Except he didn’t at all,” says Michael. “He has forever with you.”

“Just to be clear: I’m not telling you to go kill yourself so that you can spend forever with Calum because he loves you and you love him,” says Luke. “I do want you to get out of this house.”

“So why tell me that Calum loves me in the first place?” asks Michael. “Why not just let Calum and me go around kissing each other and leave it at that?”

Luke shrugs again. The ever-present grin slips from his face. His expression sobers. He stares Michael straight in the eyes, and, not for the first time, Michael has the odd feeling that maybe, out of all of the ghosts in the house, Luke knows more than anybody else.

“It’s good to know that somebody loves you, isn’t it? When it feels like nobody else does?”

 _Yeah,_ _it is_ , thinks Michael, but he doesn’t say that, because his words get caught in his throat. Icy cold fear washes over him as he spots the familiar glint of knowing pity in Luke’s eyes. It should be impossible, Luke’s suspicion. The dead have a house-rule against interfering in the affairs of the living. That is why they don’t appear at family meal times or when Michael is summoned to his foster parents’ bedroom or, worse, when one of his foster parents come to his bedroom.

Michael always assumed that rule was his saving grace. It was his way of keeping his humiliating secret from the dead—because nobody wants to admit that the people who took him in aren’t capable of loving him. Michael thought he was safe. As long as he survived the private moments of punishment, the ghosts would never know there was anything wrong with Michael’s picture perfect life beyond the fact that his foster parents’ marriage was practically in the dumps.

But it appears, with Luke staring at Michael with so much sympathetic pain in his eyes, that Michael was a fool all along—that the living can’t keep secrets from the dead.

“What should I do?” asks Michael, sighing and ignoring the flush of embarrassment that colors his cheeks. He isn’t exactly certain what it is he is asking Luke—if he is asking what to do about his loveless foster parents or what to do with Calum’s love. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe the answers are the same.

“Get the hell out of here,” says Luke, grimly. “Get the hell out of here, and never look back—but remember that, here, despite everything, you are loved.”

 

Dinner is a tense affair.

“I’m leaving you, Todd,” says Michael’s foster mother, casually like she is announcing the dreary weather.

She hasn’t yet touched her meal.  She hasn’t turned it down yet, either. Michael doesn’t dare touch his own, though his belly is rumbling with hunger. The roast and potatoes smell so delicious, yet he knows by the time he is actually allowed to eat anything, his food will be long cold and nearly tasteless.

Michael’s foster father looks up at her, his dark eyes wide. Michael has always thought the man looked a little bit like the devil incarnate—with his dark beady eyes, well-shaven face, and graying black hair slicked back on his head. He always wears immaculate suits and never, ever goes without a solid-colored tie. Tonight is no exception, even though the formality of the family dinner is a farce hidden away from public eye. Tonight, his tie is blood red. 

“Are you?” he asks, faintly. There is a sharp edge to his voice, like he doesn’t at all believe Michael’s foster mother for one minute. “And tell me, where will you go when everything you are is what I have made of you?”

Michael’s foster mother’s lips twist into an echo of a smile. It looks all wrong painted across her bright red lips. Her eyes dart to Michael for a fraction of a second, and Michael automatically drops his gaze to his plate, fearing that he has broken some unknown rule by merely looking at her in this moment in time. He wrings his hands in his lap and counts every passing second. She returns her gaze to Michael’s foster father, mindless of Michael.

“You are a chauvinistic fool. I made me who I am today.”

Michael’s foster father snorts. It is an ugly sound that bounces off the wall, filling the room with so much derision that Michael thinks he might choke on it. Michael’s foster mother, for her part, merely raises her eyebrows at Michael’s foster father’s nerve. She picks up her fork. She doesn’t yet touch her food. Michael’s stomach growls with impatience. He stares pointedly at the plate in front of him, daring not to look up even as he watches his foster mother out of the corner of his eye and waits for her to take the first bite.

He might starve before she ever does.

“I gave you everything I am,” says Michael’s foster father. “I gave you a house when you longed for a home. I gave you a son when you longed to be a mother. I gave you a life of wealth and privilege when you longed to be worth something in this world. How dare you turn your back on me.”

Finally— _finally_ —Michael’s foster mother stabs one of the potatoes with her fork, and she slowly—ever-so-slowly—brings it to her lips. Michael lets out a breath of relief. He reaches for his own fork, still terrified to look up at his foster parents. He has been given permission to eat, and no matter how scared he is of his foster parents right now, he doesn’t want to go without his supper. He can’t be excused, either, until every single morsel of food is gone from his plate. The sooner he consumes it all, the sooner he can escape to safety.

“In the midst of it all, you failed to give me what I really need,” says Michael’s foster mother, quiet and stern.

“Oh? And what is that?”

Michael’s foster mother is silent for a moment. She lays her fork down on the edge of her plate and reaches for her glass of red wine. Slowly, she brings it to her lips and sips at the drink, her eyes piercing straight through Michael’s foster father. When she returns the glass to its original spot, she finally speaks.

“Love. You have been so caught up in building this perfect world that you forgot the most important thing—to love me.”

“I have loved you every day since the day we met.”

“ _Bullshit_ ,” snarls Michael’s foster mother. She pairs it with a laugh, throwing her head back to expose her pale neck. She glares at Michael’s foster father once more in the next second, any trace of laughter gone from her stony expression. “You have loved me on your arm for photographs. You have loved me for the picture you can put on your desk to make everyone envious of your perfect life. You have loved me for the plus-one at your office Christmas party, but you have never loved me for me.”

“Oh, and I suppose somebody else has?” challenges Michael’s foster father. There is a hint of a laugh in his question, as if the idea of somebody loving her is ridiculous. He takes a sip of his wine then puts it back down. “You cannot choose the love people give you.”

“But that is where you are wrong,” says Michael’s foster mother, coolly. “I can choose exactly what love I want to accept, and I don’t want yours anymore, not now that I have realized you do not love me and you never did.”

All the while, Michael shovels his food in as fast as he possibly can. Michael’s stomach is starting to hurt from eating so quickly, but Michael doesn’t dare slow his pace. The tension in the room is thick enough to break the strongest of knives, if one were to be used to try to cut it. Every second Michael spends here, trapped by the food on his plate, is a gamble. Sooner or later his foster parents’ argument is going to turn on him. It always does. 

“Who do you expect to love you, then?” asks Michael’s foster father. He smiles until his face goes pale. He sits a little straighter in his seat. “Not Cedric from next door? He is half the man I am!”

“He is _twice_ the man you are,” corrects Michael’s foster mother. Her lips twist into another grin. This time, it is overwhelmed with victory. She spares Michael a quick glance. “Leave us now. We shall make arrangements for you later, if you are to come with me or stay with him.”

Michael freezes for a split second, caught off guard by the command. His heart lurches to his throat and stays there. He looks down. There is still food on his plate. He has never, ever been allowed to leave the table without his plate being spotless; however, the sharp stare of his foster mother is enough to make him scurry to his feet. He nods once at her, acknowledging her command, and then at his foster father in an old habit long-beaten into him.

He flees from the dining room in the next second. His foster father’s raised voice, protesting his foster mother’s decision to leave, chases him all the way up to the second floor landing. He hurries across the old wooden floor, eager to put as much distance between him and his foster parents’ argument.

 

Downstairs, a lull sieges the house, and the front door echoes as it slams shut.

Michael slows his gait and breathes a little easier.

 

A moment later, Michael walks in on Ashton shaving himself in the upstairs bathroom. Immediately, Michael throws one hand over his eyes and stumbles back out, blubbering apologies as he rams against the doorframe in his haste to leave Ashton to his privacy. The image of Ashton, naked with his boxers around his ankles and an electric razor in his hand, will forever be burned into Michael’s brain.

"Don’t you knock?” demands Ashton, red-faced.

When Michael chances to peak between his fingers, Ashton has at least pulled up his boxers, but the electric razor still buzzes in his hand. Michael slowly uncovers his eyes, letting his hand fall to his side. Any thought of his foster parents’ argument downstairs flees from his mind as he stares at the Ashton in disbelief and humiliation.

“Don’t you lock the door?” returns Michael.

“Sure, and explain to your foster parents why the second floor bathroom is locked with nobody inside,” says Ashton, rolling his eyes.

“They don’t use this bathroom,” says Michael, “but, even if they did, what the hell do you expect them to do when they walk in on your naked ass? Burglars don’t usually break into a house to shave their pubes.”

Ashton snorts.

“Your parents wouldn’t see me, silly. They don’t know I exist, so they’d just see an empty room, and, trust me when I say, that I would get the hell out of Dodge pretty damn quickly—maybe even jump through a wall.”

“What? Is that a rule? You have to know the ghost exists to see them?” 

“It’s complicated,” says Ashton.

Out of all of the ghosts Michael has come across, Ashton is always the most willing to explain the nuances of the ghost world that Michael doesn’t understand, which Michael appreciates so, so much. Michael is pretty sure he bothered the hell out of Ashton for the first month he lived here, bombarding Ashton with question after question until Michael became a pseudo-expert on the ghost world that this house harbors. Now, Michael doesn’t have as many questions, but there is the odd occasion when he does, such as now. Ashton answers him all the same.

“You can see me, because I don’t bother hiding from you,” says Ashton. “It’d be pointless—and, quite frankly, a little rude. I mean, you know we exist, and we’re pretty good friends, so there isn’t a feasible reason to go all invisible on you.”

Michael raises his eyebrows, his gaze locking on the razor in Ashton’s hand. Ashton follows his line of sight. He chuckles as he switches off the razor, as if he has only now remembered it.

“If you’re not going to lock the door, you should probably go all invisible on me the next time you want to clean yourself up for Luke,” says Michael, with a snort. “I didn’t even know that was a thing you ghosts had to worry about.”

“We’re dead, but we’re still human. Hair still grows in inconvenient places, unfortunately.”

Michael grimaces.

“That wasn’t really something I needed to know—nor did I need to see, for the record.”

“If you would have given me five more minutes, I would have been done,” muttered Ashton, his cheeks still burning red.

“I’m sorry I didn’t know there was a waitlist for the toilet at six-fifty-three in the evening,” said Michael, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “I’ll put it down in my calendar.”

Ashton, despite his embarrassment, gives Michael a cheeky smile. He points to the bathroom door behind Michael, using the hand that is holding the electric razor. There is something oddly familiar about the gadget.

“Are you in desperate need? Or can you wait, like, five—”

A wave of horror washes over Michael.

“Is that _my_ razor?”

Ashton opens his mouth, his eyes going wide, and this alone is enough of an unfortunately confirmation that Michael doesn’t need Ashton to speak. Ashton does anyway. Michael himself is too stunned to do anything other than revel in the horror churning in his stomach.

“It’s not like it’s technically unsanitary?” says Ashton, in a feeble attempt to justify himself. “Ghost blood and human blood are totally incompatible, and—and your body doesn’t even register mine—and vice versa—so it’s not unhealthy. It’s just—they won’t let me use razors by myself—Luke or Calum or somebody has to watch me when I shave—because, well, I dunno. They think I’m going to, like, off myself again the way I did last time, but I don’t think that works for ghosts, and I’m not even depressed as a ghost. I’ve got Luke and an eternity with him. I don’t need to escape from anything, so I should totally be trusted with actual razors. I should be, and, usually, it doesn’t even matter, but I really don’t need _Calum_ watching me as I shave down there, and I wanted to surprise Luke, and—”

Michael holds up a hand, silencing Ashton’s rambling. Ashton snaps his mouth shut. His earlier confidence has waned. He holds the electric razor in question away from him like it personally offends him.

Michael can accept Ashton’s sanitary and health claims. He can, because Luke has mentioned something about this before, back when he had personally asked Michael to keep his disposable razors in the bottom drawer of the vanity, the one drawer, apparently, that Ashton is house-ruled forbidden from opening. When ghosts are house-ruled something, they have to obey, like when they ghosts are house-ruled forbidden from joining Michael’s family for mealtimes. Michael can also accept that nobody trusts Ashton with actual razors, because they’re afraid that he might use them on himself again. The results proved well enough last time to potentially tempt Ashton again.

However, there is one thing about this whole set up that Michael can’t accept.

“I shave my _face_ with that razor!”

Ashton’s eyes go even wider. He glances down at the razor in his hand then back up at Michael. The corners of his lips twitch. Three long seconds pass in silence between them until Ashton can’t take it anymore and bellows out a laugh. It all unravels from there. Ashton laughs so hard he has to clutch his side, and Michael tries to glare at him, but the indignation he feels ebbs away with every passing second until he, too, gives into the urge to laugh.

“I hate you so much,” says Michael in between chuckles, but he doesn’t mean it. “I hope you know that.”

Ashton sobers up long enough to say, “I don’t believe you,” but nothing more as he loses himself to laughter once more.

 

Michael leaves Ashton to the hall bathroom upstairs and makes his way to the one on the main level instead. He only needs to relieve his bladder, nothing more, so he figures he can defer to Ashton. Plus, Michael isn’t so certain he can even step inside of the upstairs bathroom without getting the scarring mental image of Ashton naked with his boxers around his ankles and Michael’s own razor buzzing in his hand. It is much better if Michael just avoids that bathroom for a little while.

Whatever it is that Luke has won from Ashton, Michael hopes it is earth-shatteringly amazing—or at least worth all of the dignity that Michael has had to forfeit in the entire endeavor.

So Michael does his business in the toilet on the main level and washes his hand in the cracked sink afterward. Michael’s foster father was supposed to renovate the entire house and turn it into some kind of dream home. Those plans went about as well as the ones where Michael’s foster parents were supposed to work on their marriage.

Michael flips off the light and shuts the door behind him, and, immediately upon emerging into the hallway, he freezes. His heart plummets to the ground. He has made a grave mistake.

So distracted was he by walking in on Ashton a few minutes ago that he forgot the most important rule he harbors: to make himself scarce whenever his foster parents are arguing. It is too late now. Here in front of him stands Michael’s foster father, a half-empty bottle of Jack’s finest clutched in one fist.

Simultaneously, Michael feels like both the biggest fool in all of the land as well as completely and utterly bewildered. He had heard the front door slam earlier. He should have been safe, even considering his mindless error of his self-imposed rule. It should have been his foster father who stormed out, because _it always is_ —except, apparently, this time.

Michael all at once knows that he isn’t getting out of this without at least a few bruises. Maybe even a blackened eye, too.

“You were supposed to be the solution,” slurs Michael’s foster father.

Michael flinches, but he says nothing. He has learned over the past year or so living with these people that it doesn’t matter what he says. His foster father doesn’t care to listen, nor does his foster father care to remember once the drunken stupor has passed. Michael glances at the stairs, but there is a good fifteen feet between him and the bottom step. His escape isn’t going to be found in the solidarity of his bedroom where his foster father can pretend like he doesn’t exist.

Of course, it isn’t going to be that easy for Michael. It hardly ever is. Michael shouldn’t even be surprised.

“Instead, you’re the problem.”

Michael’s foster father takes one step toward Michael, empty fist raised, and Michael makes a break for the front door. It is considerably closer than the stairs. He never makes it. He doesn’t make it more than two steps before his father tackles him, slamming him back against the bathroom door with so much force that it gives away almost immediately.

Michael stumbles backward into the bathroom. His foster father’s added weight throws off Michael’s equilibrium. He feet go out from underneath him, and Michael is falling, his head slamming against the corner of the sink on his way down.

Unimaginable pain bursts through his skull. It feels like his head is being split in two, and then—

Chaos.

Michael lands on the floor, unmoving, and doesn’t get up. He doesn’t fight to get up. He can’t, not even as angry red blood pools around him on the cracked black-and-white linoleum. Numbness spreads across his body like a wildfire.

“ _Michael!_ ” bellows Calum.

It echoes in Michael’s ears. Michael blinks open his eyes. His vision has gone fuzzy. The edges of it has turned completely black. The bottle of Jack lays shattered on the floor a few feet away from him, the alcohol spilling out of the remains like golden blood.

Above Michael, is his foster father, laying punch after punch against Michael’s already battered body. Michael doesn’t feel a single blow, not with the numbness that has overtaken his entire body. He can’t move his toes. When he tries, he can’t move his fingers, either.

Then Michael’s foster father is gone, heaved off him by an invisible force that turns out to be Calum. Michael’s foster father lands with a _thump_ against the wall on the other side of the hallway. It sounds miles and miles away, even though Michael knows that it is only a few feet.

“ _Michael_!” cries Calum again, and then he appears above Michael, the bathroom light casting a halo over him. Michael thinks he has never, ever seen such beauty in his entire life, and if this is the last thing he ever sees, he is glad he will die staring at perfection.

Somewhere deep inside of Michael’s mind, he knows that he is going to die. He vaguely wonders if this is how Luke felt when he begged his brothers to bring him back to the house so that he could spend forever with Ashton. Chances are, it probably is. When Calum falls to his knees next to him, Michael is one hundred percent certain this is exactly how Luke felt.

“Michael,” says Calum again, like he doesn’t know a single other word in the entirety of the English language.

Michael smiles at Calum. Or he thinks he does. He tries to, at least. Luke and Ashton appear then, on the other side of Michael from Calum, and Michael tries to smile at them, too, but it isn’t so easy to smile when Luke’s and Ashton’s faces are ashen. He gives it his best go anyway, because he is going to get to leave his living hell and spend eternity with these three people—the only three people who ever gave a damn about him—instead.

“Call the paramedics,” says Ashton, ever the practical one. “He isn’t supposed to die. He’s supposed to get out of here and live, dammit.”

Luke goes to reach for his phone, but Michael stops him. Or tries to. Michael can’t really move his limbs or anything, but, if he tries hard enough, he can move his pinky finger just enough to catch Luke’s attention. Luke’s eyes snap to Michael’s. Michael tries to open his mouth and tell Luke not to call the paramedics, but he can’t do that, either, so he is left to stare straight into Luke’s eyes and pray that Luke understands the desperation coursing through his dying veins.

“Luke,” says Ashton. It is almost a plea. “What are you doing? He’s dying.”

“He wants to,” says Luke, not breaking eye contract with Michael. “He’ll be here with us forever.”

Ashton shakes his head. He has always wanted Michael to get out of this house more than anybody else ever has. Maybe that is because, out of all of the ghosts, Ashton understands Michael’s taste for the freedom of death the most. Where Ashton folded to that very same temptation of freedom, he has never, ever wished the same fate on Michael. He has always believed the best for Michael, and, right now, all of that is slipping through his fingers.

“Maybe it’s for the best,” says Calum. He runs a trembling finger along the side of Michael’s face. It feels heavenly against Michael’s skin, and Michael wishes he could lean into it, but he can’t. “Think about it, Ashton. If he lives, he’ll be stuck in this hell. You and I both know this isn’t the first time that man has struck Michael. We’ve seen the bruises, but we’ve been house-ruled to not interfere. If Michael lives, we can’t protect him.”

“If Michael dies, he’s stuck here forever,” says Ashton, frowning.

“Isn’t that what I told you before you slit your wrists?” asks Calum, not unkindly. “Isn’t that what we both told Luke the moment his brothers dragged his broken and bleeding body through the front door? You both chose to stay here forever. Why can’t he?”

“You were supposed to be stronger than me,” says Ashton, trying a different tactic. Tears cloud his eyes until they spill down his pale cheeks. He looks a million miles away from the happy, impish ghost hogging the upstairs bathroom only a few moments ago. “You swore up and down you’d never do what I did with Luke, and, well, I always hoped you were naïve, but, with Michael, I hoped you’d stick to your guns.”

Calum looks away from Michael to meet Ashton’s eyes. Michael can’t see the expression on his face, not with the blackness clouding in around his own vision, but he imagines the frown hasn’t left Calum’s lips. The way that the tears spill even quicker down Ashton’s cheeks when Calum turns to him only confirms Michael’s suspicion.

“I gave you hell for Luke, and I have regretted it ever since Michael first walked in the front door. I understood then, Ashton, the choices that you were faced with and how hopeless you must have felt loving Luke as you did.”

“Calum, you don’t have to—”

“I do, and I’m sorry. Fuck, I am so, so sorry for not understanding—for not _trying_ to understand back then. But I swear, I do now, and I’m asking you to understand like I didn’t.”

Ashton sighs, falling to his knees next to Michael opposite of Calum. He reaches for Michael’s hand and holds it between his own. Michael tries to hold Ashton’s hand right back, but he can’t, so he settles on meeting Ashton’s eyes when Ashton looks down at him instead.

“I just wanted him to be happy, but I understand what you’re asking of me, Calum, and you don’t need my permission. You’ve had it this entire time, but you don’t need it,” says Ashton. “You didn’t force Luke away that day, and we all know that I want to spend eternity with Michael safe and sound here, too. Maybe not as much as you do, but I do. I know he’ll be happy here with us—with you.”

Luke goes to his knees, too, next to Ashton, and he lays his hand over Ashton’s, like he knows that Ashton needs to be comforted as they watch their friend bleed out. Calum takes Michael’s other hand. He brings it up to his lips and presses a soft, gentle kiss to the back of it. Michael looks groggily over at Calum. His vision swims even worse, but he can vaguely make out Calum’s face.

“I love you, Michael. Just let go, and you can be loved forever.”

So, surrounded by the only people in the entire world who have ever loved him and with his eyes glued to Calum’s, Michael does just that. He draws in one last breath, lets it out, then lets go.

The entire world goes black.


	3. Chapter 3

Luke waits five minutes after Michael wakes up to stare down at his own dead body before calling the police. He leaves an anonymous tip that somebody has been killed in this house. It is all very brief. Luke rattles off the address then hangs up the phone, replacing the ancient landline to its base. The only reason Michael’s foster parents even bothered to install a landline was because it came free with the Internet service. Michael can’t remember a single instance that particular phone has ever been used while he was alive.

Michael, for his part, is basically useless. It is odd, staring down at himself. Something twists in his chest at the sight of all of his own blood pooled on the cracked linoleum floor. Calum places his hand on Michael’s shoulder.

“C’mon,” says Calum, pulling Michael away from the blood and death. “There is somebody I want you to meet.”

Michael lets himself be tugged away, to the stairs and then up them until he can no longer see his own dead body. They leave Luke and Ashton behind for now, who are to watch Michael’s foster father to make sure he doesn’t wake up and try to leave before the cops show up. Michael’s foster father needs to pay for everything he has done to Michael. The ghosts can’t kill Michael’s father, no matter how much the man may deserve the oblivion of death, because he will be stuck here forever with them. They have no choice but to let the law run its course and hope for the worst to befall him.

Upstairs, Calum leads Michael down the hallway away from Michael’s bedroom to an empty room in the house that Michael’s foster parents never got around to using. It sits abandoned full of unpacked boxes, as far as Michael knows, but when Calum opens the door, a whole new world appears before Michael’s eyes. This must be the ghost realm, the place where Calum and Luke and Ashton went when they couldn’t be with Michael when he was alive.

The room is nothing more than a sitting room. It is furnished nicely with upholstered furniture that looks as if it belongs in a different era, maybe one a decade or so before Michael was born. The carpet on the floor looks brand new and like it has been taken good care of, unlike the mess of shag that covers the floor of the counterpart of this room Michael is more familiar with.

What immediately draws Michael’s attention isn’t the outdated furniture that looks brand new or even the odd glow about the room but rather the three ghosts scattered around the furniture. Michael’s breath catches in his throat. They all look just like Calum—dark haired and beautiful, a man and two women. They must be Calum’s parents and sister. Calum confirms as much in the next instance, introducing everybody, and Michael belatedly realizes that more than just Calum’s mother is dead—his entire family is dead, trapped as ghosts in this house.

Calum’s mother is the first to rise. She crosses the room in five long strides, though she carries herself as if she is gliding instead. She stops right in front of Michael and smiles at him, her lips as plump as Calum’s. Her hair falls into her face, covering her left eye.

“We have heard a lot about you, Michael.”

She holds her hand out for Michael to take. Michael has manners beaten into him, so he doesn’t hesitate to grasp her hand and shake it. Her skin isn’t cool against Michael’s own like he has become accustom to the touch of a ghost. It takes Michael the entire handshake to realize that he is a ghost now, too. There is no temperature difference for him anymore.

“It is nice to finally meet you—face-to-face, at least,” she adds. She winks at him with her right eye. “I think you’ll fit right in here, though I do offer my condolences for your passing.”

“You know that—”

“Yes, Calum,” interrupts his mother. “I do know the goings-on around here. Ghosts are not to interfere with the affairs of the living. You know the rules.”

“Your rules,” he mutters.

His mother ignores him, and turns back to Michael.

“I’m sure my son will show you around and help you adjust to everything, but if you need anything at all, don’t hesitate to ask. We ghosts dine together every night at five. I look forward to you joining us tomorrow, if it should please you.”

“Yes, ma’am,” says Michael, bowing his head.

Calum’s mother places her finger underneath Michael’s chin and raises his head back up.

“None of that now,” she says, smiling warmly at Michael like a only a true mother ever can. Michael’s foster mother certainly never smiled at him like this. “We run things much differently around here.”

She shakes her head as she speaks, and it displaces her hair, revealing more of her face. Michael’s ghostly blood runs cold at the sight of a gunshot wound painted directly above her right eye. Michael glances over her shoulder at Calum’s sister and father. His breath catches in his throat when he spies a pair of identical wounds dotted across Calum’s father’s chest, visible above the neck line of his t-shirt, and another gunshot wound cutting straight through Calum’s sister’s neck.

Michael doesn’t need to wonder how Calum died anymore. The evidence is obvious enough in the room before him. He knows that, if he were to look over every inch of Calum’s body, those very same mortal marks would be somewhere precious on Calum’s skin. Michael wants to ask what happened or maybe if it hurt when they died, but he doesn’t ask either. He isn’t sure he can force the question past the lump in his throat.

So Michael reaches for Calum’s hand instead of asking and resolves to maybe ask Luke for the story later. Luke always spills secrets. Michael suspects it’ll be easier to quench his curiosity when he isn’t staring straight at the bullet wounds themselves.

 

Life as a ghost, Michael discovers, is not much different than life as a human, except that he never leaves the house and he never has to tend to his lessons anymore. Luke is miffed about the latter, as that means his own academic interests are relegated to the library housed in the ghostly plain of one of the other spare rooms of the house.

In a sort of apologetic gesture, Michael promises Luke his boxed set of the ‘90s sitcom Luke loves so much, because, apparently, ghosts can own worldly possessions. They can also use said worldly possessions in the ghost plain since it is technically part of the house. Michael doesn’t understand the technicalities, but they do explain exactly how Luke was able to steal Michael’s clothes back when Michael was still alive. He makes a note to ask Ashton about it when he gets the chance.

Some things, on the other hand, are different.

Dinnertime becomes something Michael looks forward to. The ghosts take it in the kitchen around an old rickety table that is probably a little too small for their large group. Beyond the ghosts Michael befriended when he was alive and beyond Calum’s family, there are half of a dozen other ghosts trapped here in this house for eternity. Initially strangers, they become the best family Michael has ever had—they become the family Michael wishes he would have had when he was alive.

Michael’s bedroom becomes his and Calum’s bedroom, since, technically, Calum lived and died in the house first. Calum got to keep the bedroom that Ashton and Luke and Michael all had when they were alive. Ashton moved into the one next door when he became a ghost, and, when Luke died, he moved in with Ashton. Calum’s mother offers Michael a spare bedroom, the one across the hall from the sitting room, but Michael turns it down. It doesn’t make sense to play up a ruse that he won’t spend all of his time in Calum’s bedroom when all of the ghosts know exactly why Calum let Michael die instead of fighting for him to live.

When Michael looks in the mirror, he will now forever see a dark purple ring around his right eye and a small cut on his cheek. A long gash in the back of his head, his mortal wound, will stay with him, too. His wrists are decorated with purple bruises that look like bracelets painted into his skin. He will carry the wounds he wore the day he died for the rest of his time, including the scattered fist-shaped bruises across his torso, but Calum tells him he is beautiful anyway. Michael believes him.

Michael spends most of his time in the ghost realm, but, occasionally, he enters the living world. The newscast says Michael’s foster father has been arrested for Michael’s murder and for child abuse, and he is being held without bail in the local jail until his hearing. Michael’s blood has been cleaned from the black-and-white linoleum, though the bathroom door remains in shambles. Michael supposes his foster mother cleaned it herself. He wanders the empty halls of the haunted house as a ghost and thinks about the horrors that lie in the living world, and he knows that he doesn’t belong here anymore, so he heads for his old bedroom and enters the ghost realm instead.

He vows to never leave.

He doesn’t have a reason to leave the ghost realm anyway. Everything he wants is here. He is happy here. He has Luke and Ashton and, most importantly, Calum. That is more than he ever had when he was alive, until he moved into this house, and he will spend the rest of forever being grateful to have died happy and loved.

 

On Monday, four days after Michael died, he corners Ashton in the upstairs bathroom. This time, Michael purposefully walks in on Ashton. Thankfully, Ashton isn’t shaving himself but is rather washing his hands in the sink. He looks up at the mirror when Michael enters, an indignant statement on the tip of his tongue, but he snaps his mouth shut in shock. His eyes go wide. He reminds Michael of a cornered animal.

“You’ve been avoiding me,” says Michael.

Ashton recovers in the next second. He looks away from Michael, down at his hands. He shrugs his shoulders.

“Haven’t,” he denies. “You’ve just been busy adjusting to the whole being dead thing.”

“Luke says you blame you’re blaming yourself for what happened to me.”

“Luke should stop gossiping,” says Ashton. His words are sharp, but they fall flat on his tongue. He could never, ever speak ill of Luke. He loves Luke too damn much.

“And you should stop avoiding me,” says Michael. He sighs and waits until Ashton finishes washing his hands and turns to face Michael. It takes Ashton almost two entire minutes to stop dragging his feet, but Michael waits him out. “It wasn’t your fault.”

Ashton snorts.

“Yeah, sure. Some other ghost was using this bathroom that day, not me.”

“I chose to go downstairs instead of waiting.”

“You wouldn’t have had to wait if it wasn’t for me! And for what? A stupid—”

“I still don’t want to know whatever it is you and Luke get up to in your intimate time together,” interrupts Michael, his cheeks burning.

He holds up a hand to stop Ashton from finishing his sentence. Ashton offers him a half-hearted, tiny smile that is an echo of the smirk he would have worn a week ago. It isn’t much, but it is something—it is certainly more than Michael has gotten from him over the past four days.

“Listen, what happened was on my foster father and nobody else, but, you know, I don’t care. Dying wasn’t scary,” admits Michael. “You know that I thought about death a lot. About what it would feel like to, well, do what you did, but I was always too afraid it would hurt too much or I’d regret it or something, so I didn’t dare try to kill myself. But downstairs in that bathroom as I was bleeding to death, it didn’t hurt at all. D’you know why?”

Ashton shakes his head, but the small smile lingering on his lips suggests that he knows where Michael is going with this. Still, this is something Ashton needs to hear. Maybe this is something Michael needs to say, too.

“Because I had you, and I had Luke and Calum, and I knew where I was going—being stuck here—was so much better than the hell I was living in. Please, don’t blame yourself for my death, because I don’t blame you. More than that, don’t blame yourself for my death, because I don’t regret it.”

Michael pauses.

“All my life, I wanted to be loved. Here, I am.”

Ashton sighs.

“All my life, I wanted to be happy. Here, I am,” parallels Ashton. “I know what you mean. I do, and I understand what you are saying, but I saw so much of me in you when we first met that I didn’t want you to be sentenced to the same fate I was. You’re bigger than this house. You should have gotten out.”

Yeah, maybe Michael should have in Ashton’s eyes. Michael knows how hard Ashton worked to convince Michael to get himself out at the first chance. All of the ghosts told Michael this, of course, but Ashton was the most vocal. Ashton wore his scars on his wrists like Michael did, and Ashton knew how it felt to long for death as a reprieve from all of the living hurt. Ashton knew this, but he always believed the best in Michael.

“I never would have gotten out,” says Michael. “You and Luke and Calum—you’re bigger than my dreams ever were. I’d have grown old here, if I’d had the chance.”

“You should have had the chance.”

Michael shrugs.

“Maybe, but, you know, Luke should have had the chance, too. Maybe he should have had the chance more than me. He wanted to be a teacher. He had a family that loved him. He had the whole world at his fingertips, but life doesn’t work out the way anybody expects it to. Sometimes, the ones who deserve something the most are the ones who never, ever get it.”

Ashton sighs. Leaning back against the sink vanity, he folds his arms across his chest. The scars on his arms stand out stark white against his skin. Michael notices them perhaps now more than ever. Maybe it is the lighting in the bathroom. Or maybe it is the echoes of the pain of the living shadowed across his face.

“Life is funny like that, isn’t it? Like, it’s great for some people, and it’s shit for others, but, in the end, everybody dies, don’t they?”

“Yeah,” says Michael. “So remember that my life was shit, and, here, I’m loved, and stop blaming yourself, all right?”

Ashton smiles wryly at Michael. He pushes himself away from the sink and walks to the door. He stops in front of Michael only because he can’t go any farther.

“Your life wasn’t all bad,” he says, throwing his arm over Michael’s shoulder and using it to usher Michael out of the bathroom. Once in the hallway, he steps away from Michael. “You met Calum.”

That is true, except meeting Calum as a living, breathing human being wasn’t exactly a gift that Michael could treasure. He doesn’t point this out to Ashton, who knows firsthand all about the hopeless love between the dead and the living. He gets Ashton’s point all the same, though—that life wasn’t just good or bad. It was both.

Together, Michael and Ashton head down the hallway toward their bedrooms. They walk in silence, taking easy strides down the old hardwood floor. Ashton’s shoulder brushes up against Michael’s on every other step. It feels normal. It makes Michael feel alive, even though he isn’t anymore. The thing about Ashton is that he empathizes with Michael in ways that the other ghosts can’t.

They run into Luke just outside of Michael’s shared bedroom. He grins happily at them. As always, his eyes are mostly on Ashton. If Michael were to go invisible right now, he doubts Luke or Ashton would even notice.

“Oh, are we all joining in on the marathon?” asks Luke, cheerfully, and he manages to address Michael, too. “Where have you two been off to?”

“I walked in on him in the bathroom,” says Michael, jabbing his thumb over his shoulder to point behind him as if Luke doesn’t know exactly where he means. “Thankfully not shaving anything this time. Had to trap him somewhere. He’s been avoiding me.”

“I know,” says Luke, frowning in Ashton’s direction. When he turns his gaze on Michael, uncertainty dances behind his eyes, like he is terrified that maybe he was wrong. “I told him he was being irrational—and he was, wasn’t he?”

Ashton huffs and folds his arms across his chest. It is mostly for show. Michael and even Luke ignore him regardless. Luke is worrying with his bottom lip, so concerned for his own potential misgivings that he can’t spare Ashton even the merest reassurance. It is a rare moment.

“Of course,” says Michael, hurriedly. He doesn’t like Luke, or Ashton, thinking otherwise. “What happened wasn’t Ashton’s fault. I was the one who went downstairs even though I should have known better—experience and all, you know.”

Michael’s reassurances, though, don’t erase the frown on Luke’s lips. If anything, Luke frowns harder. He opens his mouth to speak but changes his mind and closes it in the next second. It takes him three tries to actually utter his tentative question.

“Did _I_ misunderstand you?”

“Huh?”

“Did you not want to die?” clarifies Luke. His eyes go wide, just like Ashton’s did moments earlier in the bathroom when Michael walked in on him. It is a visible example of exactly how perfect Luke and Ashton are for one another. “Oh, god. You didn’t did you? I just thought that you wanted to spend forever with us and that you didn’t want to leave, but I should have—”

“Done exactly what you did,” interrupts Michael, smiling warmly at Luke. “You are Ashton are too much alike, you know that? I’m having a hard enough time trying to convince him that my death wasn’t his fault. I don’t need to convince you of the same thing. I wanted to die, all right? I promise I did—not in any suicidal way, of course, but…”

He trails off, losing steam, because he doesn’t quite know how to explain the urge that had come over him as he was bleeding out on the floor of the downstairs bathroom. It is naïve of him to think that he has to spell this out for Luke anyway. Out of all of the ghosts trapped in the house, Luke knows best how it feels to choose to stay here forever.

“The opportunity presented itself, and you took it?” suggests Luke as a summation.

It’s a better explanation than Michael himself has ever thought of, so he nods. Maybe it was more complex than that. Michael thinks, though, that it was just that simple.

“Calum thought I was absolutely crazy back when it happened, me begging my brothers to bring me here to die,” says Luke. “He thought that I only did it for Ashton, too, and I mean, that had a lot to do with my decision, but I was dying anyway. You just—you know that you’re dying, and you have to make a decision. I couldn’t imagine spending forever without Ashton, but, truthfully, I couldn’t imagine spending forever without Calum, either. He was the best friend that I ever had. He and Ashton were so lonely here that I couldn’t just leave them.”

The question slips out before Michael can think of a reason to rein in his curiosity.

“Are you sad that you don’t get to see your family anymore?”

Luke hesitates long enough for Michael to hate himself for asking so carelessly, but, in the end, Luke shakes his head.

“It was easier to send them away than to let them live here in a house I would never leave. They stayed here, you know, for a few months after I died, but it was too much on everybody. My parents didn’t want to sell the place—they didn’t want to leave me—but I told them to go. It was hard enough burying me. They shouldn’t have had to live with me as a ghost, too,” says Luke. “Now, I get a letter in the mail once or twice a year from my family. My oldest brother got married a few years back. He has a little girl now. He sent me a picture last Christmas.”

Michael smiles, thinking of how much Luke’s family must love him to continue writing him letters even years after he died. It has been close to a decade now since Luke’s brothers carried him back here to this house to die. Michael imagines the people Luke knew would be almost unrecognizable if they were to show up at the front door tomorrow, but it must be nice to know they still care about him, human or ghost.

“I mean, it’s not what Calum’s got, but I wouldn’t wish that on my family in a million years. I’d rather they be living their lives without me than slaughtered in their sleep over nothing more than some psychotic notion of supremacy.”

Michael draws in a startled breath, the smile falling from his lips. His heart plunges to the ground. He has seen the bullet wounds that Calum’s family wears. He knows that they were all killed on the same night, but he didn’t know this. He didn’t know what was behind it.

Realization dawns on Luke. He freezes for a second, like the ghosts always used to do when they were skirting around a house-rule for whatever reason. Luke forces himself to relax.

“Luke,” says Ashton, with an air of warning.

“Cat’s out of the bag, I guess. Michael’s a ghost now, so, technically, I’m not breaking any house-rules,” says Luke, softly.

Ashton sighs, shaking his head.

“But I still think Calum should be the one to break the news to him that he was killed in a hate crime,” he says. Then his eyes widen almost comically. He covers his eyes with his hand and mutters a curse underneath his breath. “Pretty sure I just helped the cat destroy the proverbial bag.”

“It was a hate crime?” asks Michael, stunned. His heart skips a beat in his chest. A gnawing feeling grows in his stomach. “That’s what happened?”

Luke nods, biting his lips together. He glances at Ashton, but Ashton is useless, still muttering to himself about secrets. Luke turns back to Michael, resignation on his face.

“Calum doesn’t like talking about it—none of his family does, understandably. This neighborhood wasn’t exactly _welcoming_ when Calum’s family moved into this house, and, well, they thought it was nothing more than just your run-of-the-mill racism.”

“It wasn’t?” guesses Michael, flatly.

“No,” says Luke, quietly. He looks away from Michael then, as if he can’t handle looking Michael in the eye as he recounts even this much of the atrocity that trapped Calum and his family here forever. “I agree with Ashton that you should get the full story from Calum, but I know he probably won’t want to talk about it, so I’ll give you this clip notes version. Apparently, it didn’t look good for the neighborhood for Calum’s family to live in such a beautiful house or to have such well-respecting jobs in the city. There were some other reasons, too—all total racist bullshit—but one night a man broke into the house and… well, I imagine you can put the pieces together for yourself. Calum was the first to die.”

Horror wells up in Michael’s chest. His knees feel wobbly beneath him. He clenches his fists at his sides.

“They got the man who did this, though, didn’t they? The police?”

Luke doesn’t respond. That in and of itself is almost an answer. Ashton drops his hand to his side and looks Michael straight in the eye, fielding the question himself with an empty voice.

“That’s the thing,” he says, “nobody cared.”

It is like a punch straight to the gut. Michael understands now what Calum meant about scaring off the living when he danced around the story of how he died. Michael blindly reaches for the door frame next to him, needing something to ground him, but what he finds instead is a shoulder.

He jumps, startled, and whips his head around to see Calum staring at him with a blank expression. Michael doesn’t know how much Calum overheard. By the way that Calum’s hands tremble at his sides, he has heard more than enough to know that Luke has spilled the secret.

Michael can’t handle it. Calum staring at Michael like he doesn’t know how to react, so Michael reacts for him. He steps forward and throws his arms around Calum and draws him into the tightest hug he can manage. Maybe if he squeezes Calum hard enough, he can squeeze out of the bad that has plagued Calum for a long, long time.

“Can’t tell Luke anything, can you?” jokes Calum, but his voice is so thin that it falls flat. He stands rigid in Michael’s hug, like he doesn’t know what to do exactly with Michael’s comfort. “I swear, he tells everything he knows, especially to you. Ashton isn’t any better, either. He likes to pretend he is, but he isn’t.”

“Should have house-ruled me better,” says Luke. His joke goes over better than Calum’s, but even it lacks the humor it should carry. He is only playing along to smooth over the wrinkles of tension that have arisen between them. He steps closer to Ashton to wiggle himself underneath Ashton’s arm. Ashton is eager to welcome Luke in his hold. “There are no secrets among ghosts.”

“Among best friends, you mean,” corrects Ashton, faintly.

“Don’t blame them, okay?” says Michael, loosening his hold on Calum only enough to lean back and look him in the eyes. “I was curious, and I asked.”

“I know,” says Calum, sighing. “I heard it all. It was easier to let him tell my story than me. I don’t want to scare you off.”

“Why would someone else’s ignorance color my opinion of you?”

“Because,” says Calum, wiggling out of Michael’s hold. Michael is reluctant to let Calum go, but Calum is persistent. When he is free, he reaches for Michael’s hand and guides it underneath his own shirt. He doesn’t stop until Michael’s hand is resting above his heart. “I can’t forget what that person did—how that person hated me for being who I was—for the rest of my existence.”

Calum coerces Michael to press his fingers into his skin, and when Michael does, Calum’s skin gives way. Bile rushes up Michael’s throat. This is Calum’s mortal wound. The gunshot that had claimed his life had also claimed his heart. Michael sucks in a startled breath, his eyes glued to Calum’s.

“My mother says we shouldn’t scare off the living with tales of their own horrors,” says Calum. He breathes in a deep breath, forcing Michael’s fingers a little deeper into his wound. “I think what she really means is that we shouldn’t glorify death. I didn’t want to tell you how I died, because I didn’t want you to associate me with death and convince yourself that you loved death so much that you wanted to stay here forever with me.”

Michael raises his hand to Calum’s cheek, cupping it gently. Calum leans into Michael’s hand and closes his eyes. His lips tremble. Michael wants to kiss him right here, so he does with Luke and Ashton witnesses. It isn’t much of a kiss, just Michael’s lips pressed against Calum’s, but Calum melts underneath it.

“I would have taken forever with you however I could have had it,” says Michael, softly. “I would have grown old in this house loving you if that’s what you wanted.”

“I wanted you to get out while you still could and experience _life_ ,” says Calum. His voice is wobbly and thick with emotion. “I wanted you forever, yes, but I wanted you happy more.”

“Well, you’ve got both of your wishes now,” says Michael. “You’ve got me forever, and as long as I’m yours, I swear to you I will be happy.”

“You just have to share him with us,” says Luke, grinning. “Ashton and I still have like three bets going on that involve him, and if Ashton loses one of them—”

“I don’t want to know,” interrupts Michael.

Luke laughs, throwing back his head so that it rests in the crook of Ashton’s neck. Ashton, for his part, shakes his head fondly at Luke. His cheeks are pink, flushed with embarrassment, but the overwhelming amount of love in his eyes for Luke belies outweighs everything else.

Michael smiles at the pair of them. He likes how head-over-heels in love with each other they are. He likes their promise of forever together. He can only hope that he and Calum will one day have that same type of all-encompassing love for one another that Luke and Ashton exude.

“Think you can handle those terms?” asks Michael, turning back to Calum. “Think you can keep me forever but also share me with those two?”

“I think I can live with that,” says Calum, ironically, and he chases Michael’s responding laugh with a kiss.

 _Yeah,_ thinks Michael, _we can all live with that_.

**Author's Note:**

> [tumblr](http://tigerlily-sunshine.tumblr.com/)
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> The specific tag for this fic is found [here](https://tigerlily-sunshine.tumblr.com/tagged/There%27s-no-Pride-in-Sharing-Scars-to-Prove-It) on my tumblr.


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